Social inequality in schools: how can teachers redress the balance?

Authors Avatar by ana8 (student)

Last month I spent several hours catching up with a group of 14 or so people I encounter every seven years. I couldn't wait to hear all that had happened in their lives since I last saw them, although I knew the conversation would be, as ever, pretty one-sided: they've never met me before, you see.

These 14 people are the 7 Up group: the stars of the ground breaking series initially directed by Paul Almond. In 1964 Almond set out to explore the Jesuit motto: "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man". He selected a group of seven year old children from a range of social backgrounds. These children have subsequently been interviewed at seven year intervals, and the resulting series of films is a journey through 14 lives; each watermarked with existential dichotomies: dreams and the realities they give way to, innocence and the loss of it; the conflict between our ideals and desires.

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The exploration of the great British class system is central to 7 Up: this, and the knock on effect it has on children's education and aspirations. Almond set out to give us a snap shot of the year 2000, realising that the seven year olds in the first film would end up as the "union leader and the business executive of the year 2000". Through the course of the 7 Up series we discover that the movers and shakers of 2000 turn out to be - unsurprisingly – not the boys from the children home, or the girls from East ...

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